Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  “That’s just meta-dating,” I said.

  “But that’s what Rohmer is, don’t you think?”

  He was right, though not quite.

  But as I was nursing my drink among such good friends, I tried to put together the history of the film in my mind: how it took me back to my first sighting of Monet, which was now permanently laced into the memory of our home by the beach, and how this too was tied to my seeing the film in 1971, which took me to my college days, and to my grandmother whom I’d gone to visit in France that summer and who had since then died, and I thought of all the times I’d seen Rohmer’s films again and again since 1971, especially on Sunday evenings with other friends in a small church that charged a dollar a ticket—all of it is so braided that I could no longer and still cannot sort apart the strands of time. Then suddenly at the bar I remembered my girlfriend in her bathrobe. She too belonged to a strand of time. “The film is so simple,” she’d once said. “It’s about a man who wants a woman but is happy to have just a part of her because he knows he can’t or shouldn’t even presume to have her. It’s like wanting a whole suit and settling for a swatch of cloth.”

  But then it occurred to me that the film is also about something else: it’s about the friendship of Aurora and Jérôme, who are frequently sending each other vague allusions about their friendship that could so easily morph into something else but that won’t because neither probably wants it to or dares to think it might.

  The whole film was never about Claire’s knee. What a red herring this was. The film is about the ever-intimate conversations between Jérôme and Aurora, which are entirely reminiscent of that one-night extended dialogue between Maud and Jean-Louis. The Rhomerian encounter was between Jérôme and Aurora, and no one noticed, not even the two of them, that theirs was no platonic love at all.

  But the film was also about me, except that I couldn’t tell this to my friends, because I wasn’t sure it was or that I was entirely grasping this myself. It was about the me I might have become had I continued to live in that house on a hill a few steps from the beach. I was seeing who I’d have been in the person of the actor Jean-Claude Brialy, and the best way for me to understand what was happening between him and me was to see myself as versions of him, the me I might have been but hadn’t become and wasn’t going to become but wasn’t unreal for not being and still hoped to be, though I feared I never would. The irrealis me. I’d been groping around this for years.

  If I liked Rohmer’s contrarian insights and counterfactual view of the world, it’s because neither he nor I was ever quite at home in what everyone else called the real, factual world. We were making up another world with what was good about the world we knew. I was making mine up with driftwood from his.

  EVENINGS WITH ROHMER

  Chloé; or, Afternoon Anxiety

  The last time I saw Chloe in the Afternoon in a movie theater was in February 1982. After that I watched it countless times on TV or on a computer monitor. Over the years, however, those small-screen viewings left no impression on me and melded into a sort of disembodied mush. Perhaps I’d seen the movie too many times; I can’t remember anything about even a single home-screen viewing. There might be a reason for this. We can study a film more closely on a computer, but we can’t let the film take over our lives or our imagination. One has to be overpowered and kept in complete thrall in a large, dark hall to let a movie do what it is supposed to do: take us out of ourselves and borrow our lives.

  I remember this last screening perfectly, because it occurred on the very day that I’d lost my job, which was why I was free to see a film that weekday afternoon. I called a woman with whom I’d been desperately in love for four years, and together we went to New York’s Alliance Française. She wore boots, she wore a shawl, she wore Opium. In the movie theater we ran into my father and his friends; they had just seen the same film earlier that afternoon. I was happy finally to have the opportunity to introduce her to him; I introduced her as my friend—because this was what she was, a friend. She knew I was still in love with her, my father knew, even the man who was also fired that same morning and who was my best friend and remained so even after marrying her—he knew it too.

  Four years earlier I had made a pass at her, but she had turned me down—brusquely. Two years later, it was her turn to make a pass; to my shame I didn’t realize it was a pass until she told me so, three days later. By then it was too late, she said. I never recovered from this. Perhaps neither of us did. So there we were, two ex-lovers who’d never been lovers, forced to be friends without really caring to be, yet neither daring—while possibly wishing—to be other than just that. Perhaps friendship was all we had to give. Perhaps ours was an unhappy medium lodged between a might-have-been that never was and a could-still-be that didn’t stand a chance.

  I was uneasy watching the film with her. A film about afternoons seen in the afternoon. This was about us, I thought she thought. The plot couldn’t be simpler. A woman, Chloé, turns up in Frédéric’s office one day completely unannounced. They had a friend in common years before and knew each other very slightly. He isn’t too pleased by her visit but remains distantly cordial. A few days later, she reappears, almost as though she’d been encouraged to do so. With the passing of weeks and her frequent reappearance, Frédéric, who is happily married, will eventually want more than friendship with Chloé but has no clue how to ask for it without compromising himself, nor is he so sure that he even wants the friendship, much less the no-strings-attached sex that she is so clearly offering him. He may, in fact, want nothing at all from her. But he finds himself cast in the awkward position of someone who should want something but really doesn’t, and he can’t bring himself to tell her so, especially when he sometimes catches himself wanting it.

  Besides, the film, as all Rohmer films were to me then, was not about friends who could become lovers or lovers who prefer to stay friends, but seemed to probe some amorphous condition that I was plenty familiar with: namely, that strained, frequently uncomfortable middle mist that hovered between friendship and sex where one is too reluctant to move things one way but not particularly eager, or encouraged, to move them in the other. There might be a third choice, but it has no name, and no one knows where or how to look for it.

  It would have been too Rohmerian for us to even broach the subject of our hazy friendship and air out its history, its uneasy turns, maybe even its bruises. Without quite knowing it, perhaps, I had taken her to see this film in the unavowed hope that the movie might do the talking for me, push things along, force us to open up what we’d been so silent about, maybe even bring things to a crisis. It did not. Nor did we let it.

  In the end, it was safer and more accommodating to ignore the theater armrest where both our elbows touched in the dark. One look and we both knew why we were so quiet.

  It was nighttime when we walked out of the theater. There was nothing we wished to add or say about the film. We walked up Third Avenue to a small Chinese restaurant in the low eighties, where we had dinner. Then I put her in a cab, and she went back to her place. Later that same week I called to ask if she wanted to go to the movies again. She said she was going away that weekend. We did not speak again for a whole year.

  It took me a week or so to realize why what we had was not and could never be Rohmerian. To be Rohmerian, a situation has to occur between a man and a woman who are essentially strangers; they may have met a couple of times before or had a few friends in common, but they were never close and had no interest in being close. As always in Rohmer, what brings them together now is nothing short of serendipity. Someone may have introduced them over dinner. Or both happened to be accidental summer guests in the same villa by the beach. Or, as in Chloe in the Afternoon, one decides to look the other up for no real reason, perhaps out of sheer ennui and whimsy. But the ice breaks, and suddenly they find themselves enjoying each other’s company, even if reluctantly and without the remotest expectation that their friendship is headed anyw
here. They both know that whatever light was kindled between them has a very short life span and that the two will more than likely soon become complete strangers. They are like two passengers who happen to sit next to each other on a train and who find themselves almost playing at flirtation simply because the situation seems to call for it, or because, despite having no ulterior motives, they don’t know how else to behave. Something could come of this, but chances are that nothing will. Frédéric is very happily married and very much in love with his wife, Hélène, and Chloé is far too erratic and freewheeling to want to settle down in a long-term relationship with a married man. But the game is tempting, and they find themselves confiding truths about themselves that they’d never have the courage to confide to those they claim to have no secrets from. Candor and boldness exist not necessarily between people who are intimate, but between two individuals who scarcely know each other and find it easier to confide intensely private details precisely because they might easily never meet again.

  My friend and I were not strangers. But we were not intimate either. Watching Frédéric shuttle between his wife and his would-be mistress reminded me that we too were caught in an emotional no-man’s-land, except that ours thrived on silence and oblique hints, while theirs floated between amicable candor and a disabused sense of where things were unavoidably headed. They speak without blushing, without faltering, without ever feeling awkward or uneasy. When they’re drawn to kissing, he tells her about the wife he loves. She scorns his pieties and reluctant caresses and reminds him that, contrary to what he fears, his wife doesn’t have to know.

  The two like putting their cards on the table and telling each other that, though they may not be particularly interested in each other, they are by no means indifferent. She’ll eventually tell him she is in love with him but that all she wants is a child from him. He finds her very attractive but on more than one occasion can’t help bringing up his wife. What makes their situation so unmistakably Rohmerian and so totally unlike mine is that they are completely dispassionate about each other. I wasn’t dispassionate but wished to think I was. One day, I kept hoping, I would be able to sit over lunch with her in a French café in Manhattan—it would have to be French—and go over the story of our lapsed faux-something-or-other love-friendship as blithely as the two would-be lovers do in Rohmer’s film.

  As with My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee, what I continued to admire in Rohmer’s men was that speaking about what they want or do not want comes not, as many think, after intimacy, when one tends to open up more freely, but before physical contact is even a possibility. Verbal intimacy trumps physical intimacy each time—which might explain—just might—why consummation does not occur or isn’t even sought. Rohmer’s characters may have no problem with desire—they always have a desired someone else (Françoise instead of Maud, Lucinde instead of Claire, Hélène instead of Chloé, Jenny instead of Haydée in The Collector)—but emotional clarity and, better yet, verbal clarity always take precedence. There is something almost unbearably bold in how Rohmer’s characters not only refuse to veil their feelings and intentions but rather go a step further and clearly enjoy the deliberate and near-libidinal manner with which they expose their desires, their doubts, their ploys, down to their shameful subterfuges, to the very persons who stir their desires and subterfuges.

  I had often been in the habit of using friendship to draw closer to women. When contact was not easy, I found myself concealing my desire or couching it in ambiguous terms or silencing it altogether. Rohmer’s characters trust language, partly because they do not like to let passion cloud their judgment or their ability to speak it, but also—conversely—because language almost always helps them conceal their true motives, mostly from themselves. In My Night at Maud’s Jean-Louis may deliver a very persuasive speech about his newly embraced Catholic faith, but in the morning, still fully dressed and in bed with Maud, his body flouts all his moral protestations of the night before.

  Still, even when they are totally deluded, the ability of men and women to speak the most elusive, awkward, bare truths to each other is never an act of confrontation, which is antisocial—and Rohmer’s universe is far too placid and tactful to be anything remotely antisocial. Instead, it is an act of penetration. Pénétration, which is the French word for insight, not only flatters everyone’s intelligence but frequently sees things through a prism that is slightly paradoxical or anti-doxological and is best suited to explain our behavior and our desires to ourselves and others. It is a medium not of seduction but of exposure. If the word pénétration harbors another meaning, perhaps this is not entirely coincidental: it suggests that the pleasure of reading or intercepting or spying into one’s own or someone else’s psyche is itself irreducibly erotic and libidinal. It may explain why the pleasures of insight and exposure in Rohmer almost always deflect those of the flesh. It also explains why candor can be so clever and so sexy.

  Here is Frédéric’s internal monologue about his feelings for Chloé. It is drawn from the book version of Chloe in the Afternoon.

  With Chloé I feel oddly at ease. I confide in her as I have never confided in anyone, even my most secret thoughts. Thus, instead of repressing my fantasies, as I used to do, I have learned to bring them out into the light of day and to free myself from them … I have never before been as open with anyone, least of all with the women in my life, with whom I always thought I had to put up a good front, to wear the mask I thought they wanted to see. Hélène’s seriousness and intellectual prowess have led me gradually to keep our conversations on a superficial level. She likes my wit, and a kind of mutual modesty has grown between us, a tacit understanding to refrain from discussing anything we feel really deeply about. Probably it’s better that way. This role I play, if indeed it is a role, is in any case more pleasant and less stiff than the one I played when I was going with Miléna.

  About his wife: “I don’t love my wife because she’s my wife,” says Frédéric, thinking he has finally grasped the essence of his relationship with his wife, Hélène, “[I love her] because she’s the way she is. I’d love her even if we weren’t married.” To which comes Chloé’s totally chiding retort: “No, you love her—if you love her—because you think you have to.”

  There is nothing as disarming and as enchanting as this back-and-forth between Rohmer’s characters. They are intelligent, and even when they are smug and speak their delusions, there is always a touch of brio and brilliance in these exchanges.

  The love of insight may, in the end, be more compelling, more libidinal, than love itself.

  If Freud was fierce when stripping the human psyche of its myths and illusions, Rohmer’s gesture is tamer and perhaps more forgiving; it not only turns divestment of illusions into an art form, it simultaneously rehabilitates our illusions by giving them a new face, a better mask. Yet no one is fooled.

  * * *

  The last time I’d seen Chloe in the Afternoon before this was a few months earlier. I was alone late on a weekday afternoon in early fall of 1981 at the Olympia Theater on 107th Street and Broadway. The Olympia does not exist any longer, and neither does the 68th Street Playhouse, where I’d originally seen Claire’s Knee and Chloe in the Afternoon in the very early 1970s. Autumn 1981 was an exceptionally lonely period for me. I had just moved back to New York after eight years in graduate school and felt totally rudderless, with no degree, no career plans, no money, and not a single friend in the city.

  I had gone to see the film because I had absolutely nothing else to do that day, but also because I wanted to nurse the illusion that I lived in Europe, preferably Paris, and that I had a successful career, maybe even a wife and a family. Nine years earlier, the film had given me the image of life in France. Now I was as old as Frédéric. My life had no script; everything had stalled to a halt. And I didn’t want to be on the Upper West Side. I had promised my mother I’d attend her Rosh Hashanah dinner that evening, but I was in no mood to celebrate anything. So I sat and watch
ed the romance of a man who is so thoroughly pleased with himself, his life, and his prospects that he ends up turning down a woman who is basically offering herself to him with a lot of affection, if not even love.

  When I left the movie theater I felt more solitary than ever, and the dream bubble that envelops us as we walk out of a film theater burst the moment I spotted tiny, desiccated Straus Park across the street. Broadway at that time of the evening, and in those years, was dirty, with homeless people sleeping in makeshift corrugated cots just about everywhere along the sidewalks. Not a sight to compare with my imagined Paris.

  I had walked out hoping to be enveloped by something I’d taken away from the film, a sort of residual incandescence that might add cinematic luster to my drab autumnal evening. I wanted a state of reverie to blossom between the film and me.

  But nothing like this happened. All I could do as I walked home was to measure how distant too was the first time I’d seen Chloe in the Afternoon in the fall of 1972. By then I had met a few women, loved and been loved by some, and even lived with one for a while. But when she settled in Germany during her junior semester abroad, we broke up. Faculty and friends at my school knew we’d been living together and kept asking about her. She’s spending the semester in Germany, I said. Then they stopped asking, and I couldn’t understand why.

  During that fall semester, my last in college, I had arranged to have my Tuesday afternoons free from work. One Tuesday, I walked up Third Avenue and headed to the 68th Street Playhouse. I would see the film by myself. As usual, back row, cigarettes at the ready, and a small notepad in case ideas sprang to mind. I’d just bought a new sweater that afternoon and was pleased with the flirtatious banter that had blossomed between me and the French salesgirl in a boutique on Sixtieth Street between Second and Third Avenues. I knew I’d paid a lot for the sweater, but I liked the sweater, liked the scent of wool, and I liked the girl. Even if I knew that nothing would come of our short badinage, still, the possibility of talking with so beautiful a woman in French had pleased me. I even liked the residual scent of the store on the sweater.